Technology at work: Willis Emmons and Assistant Professor Li Jin review a video of Jin teaching.

Photo by Neal Hamberg

Every day at HBS, several professors bring their unique teaching skills to the same material in the required MBA curriculum. So Willis Emmons, director of the School’s new Center for Teaching and Learning, videotaped multiple sections of a number of first-year courses in order to have side-by-side comparisons of how different faculty members approach the same course.

“Video is a great tool for coaching,” says Emmons, who reviewed and analyzed the tapes and found excellent examples of alternative approaches for opening and structuring the classes as well as techniques for handling classroom challenges.

While case teaching is definitely an art, there are many technical aspects that can be taught, and that is one of the goals of the C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning.

Named in honor of the late Chris Christensen, a longtime HBS faculty member and legendary case-method teacher, the center was permanently endowed with campaign gifts totaling $25 million. In May, members of the HBS community gathered to celebrate the center.

Presently located in Loeb House, the center meets an important need of training current and future generations of case-method teachers. In the coming months, the center will hire a re-searcher and several consultants with expertise in a variety of teaching areas.

Emmons and his staff will work with both new and experienced faculty to evaluate and refine their teaching techniques. After he analyzed the tapes of the first-year courses, for example, he worked with the professors to help them learn from videos of their teaching and from each other.

Videotaping classes is one of several tools Emmons will use in cooperation with HBS faculty to shed light on ways to improve teaching. The center will offer a range of services to help faculty improve their teaching skills, including one-on-one coaching sessions, seminars on particular classroom challenges, group workshops, and published materials.

Assistant Professor Li Jin has already benefited from the new center. “Willis has been instrumental in helping me enhance the dynamics of the classroom,” says Jin. “He’s taught me how to more effectively engage the students. There are now more flows of information among the students and from the students to me, rather than just from me to the students.”

Appointed director last October, Emmons brings to the center his own experience as an award-winning teacher — he was a member of the HBS faculty from 1989 to 1999 and taught at Georgetown from 1999 to 2004 — and as a student at Harvard, where he earned an AB (1981), MBA (1985), and Ph.D. (1989). “The School has always fostered good mentoring relationships among its faculty,” notes Emmons. “The center will complement that important practice.”

The center will also pursue best-practice research on a range of topics, including the tailoring of teaching techniques by subject area, the evolution of teaching styles over time, and the role of gender and ethnicity in the classroom. Research findings will be used in interactive media materials developed and distributed by HBS Publishing.

A natural teacher himself, Emmons’s enthusiasm is clear. “HBS’s history of excellence in case-method teaching provides an extra-ordinary starting point for this new initiative,” he observes with pride. “The donors who supported the Christensen Center will enable the School to continue to build its global leadership in best practices and innovation in participant-centered learning.”

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